AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Megan Garber

April 9, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Last week, as a result of its most recent hackathon, Yelp rolled out a new system for its mobile apps: the ability to search business listings with small, cartoon-like figures called emojis. So: looking for a nearby pizza spot? Type a pizza emoji into your search field. Want to wash...

April 2, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Space has often been celebrated as a place that allows humans, literally and otherwise, to transcend the petty divisions of life on Earth. Astronauts, upon seeing the planet from outside its borders, often comment on how small the planet's vastness makes our differences seem. The grounding philosophy of the International...

March 28, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Don Quixote famously—infamously—tilted at windmills. Were his story set today, though, Cervantes might have to change things up a bit: the monsters the self-styled knight battles might be set in the sky. Soon, in the airs above Fairbanks, Alaska, a wind turbine will be launched. It will use helium to...

March 14, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The Houghton Library on the Harvard campus holds the university's collection of rare books. Inside its walls—in addition to objects culled from the old "Treasure Room" of Widener, the school's principal library—you'll find Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; information about the creation of books; and collections of papers from, among many...

March 6, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
It started with the Internet. "One day," Jamie Edwards recalls, "I was looking on the Internet for radiation or other aspects of nuclear energy." (As one does.) Through that search, he came across the story of Taylor Wilson, an American who, in 2008, had become the youngest person ever to...

March 3, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Late last week, from a launch pad at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, a rocket shot toward space. Nestled inside it was an amalgam of solar arrays and communications equipment and propulsion instruments, all of them cobbled together in the utilitarian-chic manner favored by aerospace engineers—one more satellite...

February 3, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Space, on top of everything else, is cold. Really cold. The cosmic background temperature—the temperature of the cosmic background radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang—is 3 Kelvin, or -455 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet there's variation within that. Solar winds can reach millions of degrees Fahrenheit. And then...

January 30, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
The White House regularly tweets sentences from key (and also from not-so-key) speeches on its various feeds. Which made Yahoo's News Chris Wilson and Olivier Knox wonder "whether the president's speechwriters were actually crafting his speeches to fit in Twitter-friendly increments." Perhaps it would stand to reason that presidential speeches,...

January 10, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Yesterday afternoon, at 1:07 pm Eastern Standard Time, the Antares Rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, bound for the International Space Station. The rocket, developed by Orbital Sciences, will deliver science experiments, supplies, and even some children's books to the orbiting lab via the commercial firm's Cygnus spacecraft....

January 9, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
LAS VEGAS—Call them Cakerbots. Adding to the growing list of things you can 3D print (toys, human organs, pizza that will be eaten on Mars, etc.) is a machine promising that, with it, you can print yourself some dessert. In the "3D Printing" section of the Consumer Electronics Show, one...

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.